[7] Looking at children, Freud identified many forms of infantile sexual emotions, including thumb sucking, autoeroticism, and sibling rivalry.

[10] Freud sought to link to his theory of the unconscious put forward in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and his work on hysteria by positing sexuality as the driving force of both neuroses (through repression) and perversion.

The Three Essays underwent a series of rewritings and additions over a twenty-year succession of editions[11]—changes which expanded its size by one half, from 80 to 120 pages.

[12] The sections on the sexual theories of children and on pregenitality only appeared in 1915, for example,[13] while such central terms as castration complex or penis envy were also later additions.

[14] As Freud himself conceded in 1923, the result was that "it may often have happened that what was old and what was more recent did not admit of being merged into an entirely uncontradictory whole",[15] so that, whereas at first "the accent was on a portrayal of the fundamental difference between the sexual life of children and of adults", subsequently "we were able to recognize the far-reaching approximation of the final outcome of sexuality in children (in about the fifth year) to the definitive form taken by it in adults".